he Art Renewal Center® is proud to present the award winners and finalists in our sixth International ARC Salon™ Competition. This year we had well over 1700 entries with outstanding results.

Together with 3 Awards in each of the 6 Categories, plus the addition of 4 Chairman's Choice Awards and 5 ARC Staff Awards and Purchase Prize Awards, the allotted prize amount in this year's ARC Salon™ has totaled more than $80,000.

Once again the quality of work submitted to this year's competition was overwhelming. To quote our recipient of the William Bouguereau Award and First Place Winner in the Drawing Category, Marina Deiul upon notification:

"I Can't believe it ! When I think that 5 years ago I didn't know there were people interested in realism, I hadn't even meet another realist artist...Today is really an exceptional moment in my life!"

Since it's inception 6 years ago, the ARC Salon™ has evolved considerably. One of the most significant changes has been in the overall quality of
the work submitted, which continues to impress us anew each year and makes the finalist selection process ever more challenging. Last year the finalists were narrowed down
to 204 works and this year we struggled even to get the number down to 368. We then removed an
additional 82 images that did not receive any votes, giving you the 286 images displayed here.

For the first time this year, we added an animal category which produced 31 finalists from an enthusiastic and talented new pool of artists. If there was ever a year to
purchase a catalogue, this would be it. With over 80 more works than previous years, this expanded catalogue will display over 300 full-color images from some of the
best realist artists in the world.

Executive Director of Programs

This year the salon comes out about 90 days before we expect to have in our hands the William Bouguereau Catalog Raissoné which I have worked on for 32 years, first with Mark Walker and then more intensively with Damien Bartoli. Mark passed away in 1993 and we lost Damien this past December.

In the Introduction, we reveal a body of revelations that have been saved for this occasion, which exposes the depth and breadth of the lies and distortions that have been perpetrated by Modernist art historians who have buttressed up their paradigm of deconstruction and destruction with a series of events that never happened. We chronicle what actually did happen and so have set the basis for a new "Real" art history of the past 160 years.

I hope you all will purchase this two volume set which can be pre-ordered on line on the ARC website at:www.arc-store.com/wibocara.html. Participants in the ARC Salon™ will receive a 15% discount from the $350 retail price. Of the 1,000 sets that will be available in by August, over 600 of them are already spoken for.

--Fred RossChairman

t is with great pride we once again present the winners of our ARC Salon™ competition, this time for 2009-2010.

The figurative, category as always, received the most entries, so we've decided that next year we will create a separate category for single figure and a second category for multi-figure works. Since there is far more competition for figurative works it seems a lot fairer to those candidates. The level of skill and quality that we see coming in continues to be moving from excellent to incredible as we see great originality of emotion, poetry, perspective, composition and technical methodology.

As I said last year, the " Humanist, Classical, Traditional Realism is back in full force..." and it is "...the only paradigm of fine art capable of expressing the full range of human ideas, beliefs, concepts, values, and emotions. Just as the immense vocabulary of written language, with its endless complexity and sophistication, is capable of expressing any idea a human being can create, so too with a realist vocabulary, (all things in the real world around us), we are able to express the full range of human thoughts, ideas, concepts, beliefs, values, and emotions (including even those in fantasies, dreams, myths and legends) within the fine arts of drawing, painting and sculpture."

There are many wonderful works amongst the winners, Honorable Mentions and Finalists this year necessitating increasing by several pages this year's catalogs.

Please encourage every fine artist that you know to enter next year's ARC Salon™. We know that there are a number of top quality artists, including several ARC Approved Living Master's, whose lives, careers and commissions are doing so well that they did not have time to enter the salon. This is a mistake, for Traditional Realism needs to always have the best of the best competing if we are to once again see Traditional Realism reach the heights achieved in the past. It takes the pressure of the most skilled, the most talented and the most creative minds competing for the top prizes, with the kind of advancements that only can come from continuous feedback and cross pollination of skills, methods and brilliant ideas.

For those who did not win, and those who did not even make it to the finals, many of you still demonstrated very high and advancing levels of quality and accomplishment. Please don't be discouraged. There is always next year, when with hard work and uncompromising dedication you just may be a winner. Many of this year's winners only won after several years of disappointment.

Different artists hit full stride at different times in their lives. Michelangelo lived to 88 years old, but he produced his David when he was only 22. Bouguereau by comparison lived to 80 but did not start producing the paintings he is best known for until he was 40, and even then it was a 5 year transition before he hit full stride when he was 45 years old in 1870. He then produced hundreds of masterpieces well into 1903 when he was 78.

Once again, please join us in wishing warm and robust congratulations to all of our winners, honorable mentions and finalists.